


Thirty Seven Hours

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: AOD era, Humor, Insomnia, M/M, frathouse era, hxc hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey is awake for thirty seven hours and starts to go a little crazy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thirty Seven Hours

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn’t going to post this, because I was fairly sure that large chunks of it don’t make sense. Then I figured that few things make sense in the mind of a sleep deprived person, and there’s no reason I should contribute to the slowness on the MRP if I have not-terrible things to post. 
> 
> This story was kind of an experiment...I usually write a dynamic where both parties are ignorant to one another’s feelings, and the second said feelings are made clear, they skip off into the future together merrily. I wanted to make both characters perfectly aware of what was going on, but have them resist for whatever reason. I’m not sure if it worked. We’ll see. Thanks for reading!

~*~

24 hours

Davey has done 24 hours before. 24 hours is nothing. In fact, 24 hours can feel good, it can be a nervy rush of energy that commands him from the chest, threads him full with a clarity and brilliance he lacks when his brain is clouded by the proximity of sleep, either ahead of or behind him. He feels high on 24 hours, and things make sense, words and feelings he can’t name on other days become expressible.

He’s currently riding on such a high, sitting cross legged on his floor with the booklet of every David Bowie album to date arranged chronologically in front of him. He’s constructing a theory concerning Ziggy Stardust’ invention occurring prior to Aladdin Sane. It’s a lyrically supported theory. He has a notebook full of lines that suggest it. He thinks there might also be alphanumeric code significance in the song order. He’s not sure yet, but he has a calculator out. 

“You’re like a mad scientist,” Jade tells him when he comes to visit. “A scientist of Bowie.” 

“There is no other breed of scientist, Jade,” Davey answers, which makes no sense when he says it but makes perfect sense in regards to this theory he’s created. “We are all scientists of Bowie.” 

“Oooo-kay. Do you want a grilled cheese?” Jade is standing in the doorway, with his hip popped out and one hand in his hair, and something about him reminds Davey of the girl version of James Dean. It could be the slicked back hair, the white wife-beater, the baggy black pants. His eyes are all wide and plaintive in their ring of black kohl. Davey does not want a grilled cheese, but he wants to want a grilled cheese so that he can say yes to this confusing, unreal creature in his doorway. 

“Sometimes you make me want to kill something. Or bite a hole through my own arm,” Davey answers, certain that the ambiguity of this statement will only puzzle Jade. Jade will take it as a response to his question, not as a response to the way he’s standing like one of those cowboys in that Montgomery Clift western from the forties that was loaded with gay innuendo no one picked up on but the gays. Davey wonders what it says about him that he’s picking up on an innuendo meant for gays. He wishes it meant something as simple as being gay, but he knows it’s much more complex than that. He also knows he wouldn’t be thinking about these things had he not been awake for 24 hours. 

“Oh, are you trying the dairy free thing again?” Jade sounds dismayed. “Sorry. I guess I’ll have to finish the box of frozen mozzarella sticks by myself.” 

“Oh no, not the frozen mozzarella sticks!” It’s Davey’s turn to sound dismayed. “I must think of tortured cows. Help me think of tortured cows.” Davey holds out his hand towards Jade, as if touching him will smooth his transition into veganism. Deep down, he is only aware that he wants to touch Jade. Jade doesn’t touch him back. 

Davey also knows that deep down, Jade _wants_ to touch him back. This is the dance they do, day in and day out since Jade joined the band and they started living together on frat row. The I-want-to-touch-you-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-know dance. It was a mutual dance, a partner’s dance. Jade was better at it, though. 

“Help yourself. I’m choosing my fluffy pink world of denial, dude. How’s Bowie coming along, anyway, speaking of fluffy and pink?” 

“He’s lovely. Do you want to hear about him?” Davey’s eyes widen hungrily. Jade takes a step back, which is a very important move in the I-want-to-touch-you-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-know dance. “God, you’re good at this,” Davey adds, and Jade should look perplexed, but instead he looks a little panicked, a move in the I-want-to-touch-you-but-I-just-made-it-obvious, fuck dance. 

Jade makes a brilliant save. “Maybe when you’ve had some sleep. Right now I want to hear the sound of butter in a pan heating up for grilled cheese.” 

“Fine. Begone with you,” Davey says. “I’m going to the gym.” He smiles at Jade’s expression of combined disgust and awe, and then shudders as Jade slowly exits in an backwards shuffle, feeling the distinct sensation of something unbearably beautiful leaving the room. 

Once Jade’s footsteps have disappeared down the hall and down the stairs, Davey turns his head to the side and bites his upper arm as hard as he can, for as long as he can stand it. 

26 hours 

Twenty minutes into his workout, Davey starts feeling like he’s going to die. The first two and a half miles are fabulous. He’s on that 24 hours awake high, his legs pumping and heart thundering in an easy, two beat dance. He feels invincible; he’s sure that he can keep going at this speed indefinitely, that he’ll only stop at five miles so he can fit in strength training before Adam brings home to-go boxes of chinese food. He’s watching his collarbones glint and shine and stand out in relief upon his reflection in the blank treadmill TV screen one minute, the flickering of his pulse a gorgeous, steady thing between them, until everything is gone. 

Then the death feeling happens. This has happened before. 

He’s suddenly struggling through a crippling exhaustion. It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to keep moving. It’s hard to remember to breathe in time with moving. He fucks up the rhythm in his desperate attempts to stay alive, and soon enough he has a fucking paralyzing side ache beneath the left arch of his ribs. 

He stops running at three miles, because stopping at 2.7 is totally unacceptable. He staggers to the drinking fountain and sucks in a few mouthfuls, and decides that even though he is clearly in need of some sleep because he’s been awake for nearly thirty hours, he must go on. Normal people stop when they’re exhausted. Davey cannot be normal. David Bowie is not normal. He must be like David Bowie. 

Davey lifts weights. He uses the lateral pull down, the hip adductor and hip abductor. He does his usual number of repetitions on each, even though each one feels like he’s moving a train with whatever muscle the machine is intended to target. Finally, he absolutely cannot do it anymore. In fact, he cannot even walk the .84 miles from the campus gym back to the frat on Channing without certainly endangering his life. 

Adam is his only hope. He sits outside, his sweat drying to an icy, sticky suit that makes him shiver in the thickening fog, and dials Adam’s cell. “Help me Adamkanobi, you’re my only hope.” 

“...Dave. You know I’m driving right now.” 

“Precisely. How far away from the campus gym are you? I need a ride. I made it so that I can’t walk,” Davey explains, picking at his sock. His headband, which is just a cotton stretchy thing to keep his dred locks back and out of his face, is soaked so throughly it feels like he has a ring of ice around his head. He takes it off, and damp chunks of dredded hair fall into his line of vision. 

“Ugh...it’s not that far of a walk, dude.” 

“It is when you’ve just worked out as hard as I did.” 

“Being unable to travel to and from the gym defeats the purpose of going to the gym, in my opinion, Dave,” Adam’s bitching, but Davey can tell that he’s going to come pick him up anyway. 

“I haven’t slept in twenty four...”he checks his orange dorky swatch watch he’s had since he was a teenager. “twenty six hours.” 

“I thought you were getting better at that whole gym=abuse equation you had,” Adam sighs. 

“I’m sitting on the curb outside,” Davey answers, ignoring the pointless jab at his life philosophies that Adam will never understand because Adam is normal. “Thanks.” 

“You owe me, Princess Leia.” 

The phone clicks dead and Davey brings his knees to his chest, resting his enormously heavy, pounding head on them. His heart has lost all consistency, and he ponders the misery of crashing and burning and falling into things. 

29 hours

Davey’s intentions were to hitch a ride with Adam, consume a container of vegetable deluxe from Mandarin House, then crash for a few hours so he could wake up at four in the morning and resume brilliance and abnormality. He values his unorthodox sleeping schedule too much to sleep all the way through the night, so Davey sets his phone alarm as he clambers down naked onto his sad excuse for a mattress in the corner of the closet that is his room. He’s sleepy in this second, which is remarkable. When you force yourself to stay up hours longer than is usual, the sensation of sleepiness becomes more and more foreign, this fleeting, delicate thing you have to catch and pin to a cork board like a dead butterfly, a train you have to catch. It’s pavlovian. Davey has classically conditioned himself to avoid sleep by rewarding himself with a positive stimulus named Jade if he stays awake. 

Because his door doesn’t lock from the inside, he’s interrupted three minutes into the sleeping endeavor by Jade’s uninvited presence in his doorway again. Jade who looks less like James Dean now that he traded his pants for boxers, but here he is, as compelling and tall and bizarrely attractive in his awkwardness as he had been that afternoon. “Whoops, sorry,” he says, and Davey bites the inside of his cheek. 

“It’s okay,” Davey says quickly, dragging the sheet up over his legs but leaving his chest, still stuck in a veneer of dried gym sweat, exposed. “What’s up?” 

“Are you going to sleep?” Jade asks. It’s not an accusatory asking tone, which is what it should be given the fact that it’s not even midnight yet and no one they live with crashes before midnight. There’s something weird in Jade’s voice, something Davey wants to pursue, a seed of shame, of uncertainty, _something._ It’s the quality Jade’s voice gets when he wants to spend time with Davey. 

“I was going to. But I can refrain if you need company,” Davey says. There’s a flirtiness to his voice, because in this one second he feels that certain that Jade wants him the way wants Jade. This kind of certainty only comes with sleeplessness. 

“Nah, you’ve been awake for what, thirty hours?” 

“Twenty nine.” Davey corrects. 

“Ah,” Jade says, holding up his index finger. Davey stares at that finger, wondering how on earth anyone’s finger could be so terribly long. “Well, you should sleep. Because it’s probably not good for you to stay up like that.” 

“No,” Davey says emphatically. He vaguely wonders if he would be saying no as emphatically were he not sleep deprived, but that doesn’t feel like it matters now. His not sleep deprived self wouldn’t want to appear overeager, desperate, or wanting. His not sleep deprived self would be worried about seeming any of those thing to Jade. However, his sleep deprived self does not care what Jade thinks. His sleep deprived self wants only to spend time with Jade, even at the cost of transparency. His sleep-deprived self is _certain_ this is all reciprocated. “No. I want to stay up with you. Look. Look, I’m getting up.” Davey stumbles to his feet. “Hand me my pants.” 

Jade fishes around in the mess of dirty clothes on the floor until he finds a pair of black zippered pants, which he tosses to Davey, but not before his eyes have roved across his half-naked body. Jade tries to appear as if it’s not happening. Davey takes his time, tries to make it unavoidable. 

“Thanks,” Jade mumbles. The catalyst of gratitude is unclear, at least to Davey. 

Davey follows him out of the room, knowing he’s missing his chance to board the sleep train, and knowing it’s a bad idea, but not caring. 

This is the issue. Davey does not have insomnia. Not naturally, anyway. He has an abnormal sleep cycle, sure, but he gets tired and wakes up like a normal person. Or, at lease he used to, before Jade came into his life and fucked it all up. Now, Davey has a full fledged sleeping disorder. He’s looked it up in the DSM-IV. He meets diagnostic criteria. 

The issue is that Davey has _forced himself_ into insomnia because he has this pathological fear of wasting time sleeping that could be spent dicking around with Jade. And by dicking around, he didn’t actually mean anything involving dicks, (though he wouldn't be opposed to such a thing); he meant hanging out in the living room playing chess, writing music, and talking about everything. He always used to hate when people said, “I really get along with this person, we talk about everything,” because _no one_ can talk about everything, but that was before he realized that Jade could. And he did. And they did together. 

There’s more. The issue is not just that he enjoys spending time with Jade. It’s that spending time with Jade makes him feel more sensations that he ever anticipated feeling in his life. It’s too much to take. It’s why he has bruises all over his upper arm inflicted by his own teeth. It’s why he’s suddenly running over three miles a day on average instead of his previous years worth of 1.5s. It’s why he can’t sleep, even if he doesn’t _choose_ not to. 

Before Jade, Davey’s attraction to guys was this far away, hypothetical thing. He thought David Bowie was attractive. He thought Johnny Depp attractive. But then, everyone did. They were attractive people, and attraction doesn’t necessitate _sex_ , attraction is just attraction. Davey always thought he was attracted to some guys because he thought they were cool or he wanted to look like them, be like them.

Then Jade the motherfucker moved in and Davey came to a new understanding of attraction. In this case, attraction _did_ mean sex. It didn’t (yet) mean actual sex, but it meant wanting it, thinking about it, losing sleep over it. It meant that when Jade left the living room to piss or get a glass of water or grab his guitar, Davey had to thrash around on the couch biting his arms, wondering how on earth it had become so unbearable to look at Jade all slouched and unkissed in his James Dean as a girl outfit. 

He thinks there might be even _more_ to it, but for now, all he can stomach is that he wants very badly to spend as much of his time as close to Jade as possible, and sleep is an easy thing to forgo in order to accomplish this. And, obnoxiously, It seems that Jade feels the same way. But instead of acknowledging it and throwing it out in the open and then fucking for the rest of eternity, they do the I-want-to-touch-you-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-know dance. It’s infuriating. 

He follows Jade down the stairs, buttoning his pants and taking deep, painful breaths, wondering whether the ache in his chest is from twenty nine hours awake, or a lifetime of impossible want. 

34 hours

Davey’s head is in Jade’s lap and he’s pretty sure he’s losing his mind. The last five hours have been spent half watching movies, talking Bowie, and recalling stupid things that happened in high school and cracking up about it. Davey had been going strong up until recently, chugging cold coffee and sailing on a second wind, but then Jade had left to heat up some mozzarella sticks, and in lieu of his absence, Davey started to question his sanity. The deterioration of his wits began with the realization that he was talking, aloud, to himself. 

“Oh my god,” he had said, spreading himself across the couch. “Oh my god, I am so fucking in love with him.” 

Then he had slapped his hand down on his mouth, because of course, Jade was only two rooms away and could have easily heard him. “Fuck,” he said. He sounded like a teenager, idiotic and immature and way too old to be talking to himself about being very illogically and inconveniently in love with Jade. 

Jade had come back into the room at that point, and Davey concluded that his responses were compromised due to sleep deprivation, so he probably shouldn’t speak. “I shouldn’t say anything. Don’t let me say anything, okay?” he told Jade. 

Holding a plate of microwaved cheese, Jade stopped in his tracks, raising one quizzical eyebrow. He was trying to decipher any codes in Davey’s speech, trying to nail down what exactly Davey _meant_. Jade was tired too, probably, so it made him easy to read. “Why not?” he asked. 

“Because I’m going to say something stupid,” Davey shared despite his prior vow of silence. 

Jade plopped down next to him, and peered down into his face. “Ugh!” Davey said, because no one should look that good at four in the morning. 

“What? What stupid shit, might you say, Davey?” Jade said in this weird, stilted voice. He wanted to know if Davey might admit his undying love for him. That had to be it. But Davey was less than certain now that Jade returned his affections, with the sun only minutes from beginning to rise, so he just stuck out his tongue. 

“You’re missing the point.” 

Then Jade sighed, and dragged Davey’s head into his lap, rendering Davey breathless and dumb and certain of little else aside from his insanity. 

And here he is, crazy and with his head on Jade’s thigh. “Why are you doing this to me?” he says, a whining lilt to his voice. 

“Doing what?” Jade asks, munching on breaded mozzarella. A crumb falls on Davey’s face and he doesn’t even care. “You are _so tired_ , dude, it’s adorable.”

“So now I’m adorable,” he mumbles stupidly. “You’re so mean to me.” 

“I’m giving you a pillow so your head doesn’t have to touch leather, how does that qualify as mean? I’m practically the best friend ever.” r32;  
“Euuughahhhaah” Davey groaned wordlessly. “You totally know. You _totally know_ exactly what I’m taking about, and what you’re doing to me, but you’re playing dumb.” 

Then Jade’s eyes catch on the dark, his mouth ceasing its chewing motion while he sets down his food and really focuses on staring down at Davey. “No. I don’t. You should tell me.” 

Davey stares back, knowing exactly what they are talking about. It could easily end now. He could do something dumb, roll over and bite Jade’s leg then scoot away, say something so sleepy and off base they’ll both laugh and Jade won’t press the matter. This has happened before. They’ve gotten this close, tread this lightly around the subject without actually _touching_ it. For an instant, Davey is ready to pull his usual bullshit, but he’s just _too tired_ to come up with something clever enough or unclever enough, so he just stares at Jade, eyes wide and dark and terrified. 

Unable to say anything, he presses half of his face into Jade’s stomach “You’re taking advantage of the fact I’ve been awake for 34 hours.” 

“I’m. Not. Doing. Anything,” Jade says, with punctuation after each word. His stomach quivers where it’s touching Davey, and Davey opens his mouth as he notices this. 

Jade closes his eyes when Davey opens his mouth, and that seems significant. 

“Lets just put another movie on. Let’s put on Boogie Nights, okay? I need some roller girl in my life, dude. Let’s change the subject in favor of roller girl,” Davey offers. His own eyes are fixed on Jade’s left arm, which is resting along the back of the couch. If they weren’t dabbling in dangerous territory, Davey thinks that Jade might drop that hand lower, so it was resting nonchalantly along Davey’s side, across his abdominals, his chest. A weird thing to do, but not weird if you pretended it wasn’t happening. I-want-to-touch-you-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-know. 

“Fuck, whatever. Okay. Okay. We’ll put on fuckin’ Boogie Nights,” Jade says, voice tight and exasperated. “You’re so ridiculous. Maybe we should just go to bed.” His fist clenches on top of the couch back, tendons rippling in restraint and Davey thinks with a weird spark of pity, _you want me so bad. Just as bad as I want you_. And then the pity turns into self pity. 

Because Davey is losing his mind, he immediately wishes Jade had put up more of a fight with that one. He wishes that Jade _had_ pressed the matter, that he had interjected and said _no you don’t, you’re gonna_ tell _me what I already know, right now_. It occurs to Davey that it’s four am, and Jade is sleep deprived, too. 

“Jade, what am I supposed to do? What the fuck do you want me to do. Just tell me, and I’ll do it.” There’s a hoarse desperation in his voice, because he means _i’ll do it_ and also, _i’ll do anything._

“I want you to get off my lap so I can put Boogie Nights in the VCR.” 

“I thought you wanted to go to bed.” 

“Well, I lied.” 

“Because you don’t want to be away from me,” Davey says, and then realizes he’s said it. “Oops.” 

Jade’s gaze darkens, the muscles in his thigh gathering so obviously Davey feels the tightness beneath his head. He narrows his eyes, like he’s trying to figure Davey out. 

“This is the part where you should probably kiss me,” Davey tells Jade, because he is very tired and under the impression that he has nothing to lose. 

The flesh of Jade’s quadriceps hardens even more, and a solid shape in his throat bob’s nervously. “I can’t do that.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because...because you’re totally delirious! What if you don’t even remember this in the morning?” 

“Jesus christ, Jade, I’m not _drunk_.” He reaches up, pulls Jade’s resisting arm down, forcing the hand onto his stomach. Jade makes a fist, decreasing the surface area with which they’re touching, and Davey pulls out from their weird position, reclaiming ownership of his head and putting his body at the other side of the couch in a clumsy retreat. He does it so Jade will follow him, but Jade doesn’t, which is frustrating. “You think I don’t know what I want?” 

Jade’s face puzzles again, a crumbling look like he can’t believe Davey is making him resist something he wants so badly. Or, at least that is what it looks like to Davey. “Are you trying to be honorable?” Davey adds. 

“No! I’m not that good of a guy, Dave. I’m...I’m practicing self-preservation, I guess.” 

The tension between them is a live thing, with two heartbeats and four lungs and too many breaths. It’s a hot thing, crackling and solid and Davey feels like he can reach into the space in front of him and grab it, pull Jade in by the air that separates them. “Self preservation because you’re worried that I’ll rethink this once I’ve slept, or self preservation because you’re scared we’ll fuck it up?” Davey breathed. 

There’s a pause, and Jade looks too good when he takes it, eyes dark enough to take shade in, mouth soft and broken and twitching in its uncertainty. “Uh, both. I think.” 

Davey shuffles impatiently. “Self preservation is not very Romantic.” 

“The real thing rarely is,” Jade says, and swallows. 

The tension curls in on itself, clenches its teeth, prepares to attack. 

“But I am the real thing. This is how I am. Me, unromantic. Thirty four hours awake and, ah, 72 hours unwashed,” Davey replies, lifting his arm and smelling underneath it. “If you like me like this, then you must really like me. Also, I’m not being very articulate, but you shouldn’t worry about _anything_ changing when I’m awake. Okay?” 

Jade shakes his head, then puts it in his hands, which he puts against the couch. He curls like a child. “I like it this way. I like wanting but not actually doing anything about it.” 

“That’s because you’re unromantic,” Davey says, and is pretty sure Jade’s lying to them both. 

“Then why the fuck do you like me, Dave?” Jade looks up sharply, a swirling kind of panic in his eyes, making them sparkle and glisten. He looks feral, a little scary. Davey doesn’t answer his question because the answer is right there, between the pupil and the iris, unspeakable and fleeting. There are too many reasons, and most of them can’t be put into words because they’re visceral feelings, they’re butterflies unpinabble to cork board, they’re sleep trains. You miss them, and then they’re gone. 

Davey crawls across the cushions and into Jade’s personal space, one shaky hand on each of his thighs. Their faces are a whisper apart, both of their eyes open, Jade’s jaw clenching and unclenching like his fists. He’s trying everything he knows to keep from kissing Davey, and Davey wants to say _this, this is why. Because you’re making this so hard for yourself. Because you think you’re afraid of romance, but resistance is the most romantic at all._ Davey can smell Jade’s fear, and his want. He can feel the tidal wave of overwhelm inside of him, because it’s the same wave that makes him talk to himself when Jade’s only one room away. 

“You should stop that,” Jade says, his breath on Davey’s lips, his eyes half-lidded and heavy. Davey feels wild with having the upper hand, crazed with his power. Jade doesn’t want to want this, okay. Whatever. It won’t change that he _still_ wants it, and Davey is persistent. He has all the time in the world. He never sleeps. 

“I don’t think I can.”

Jade makes a sound, half a moan, maybe, with just the _mm_ sound. Then he’s shaking his head, hard, canting away from Davey’s body. “Kay then, I’ll help you.” 

“No,” Davey says in a reedy voice, grabbing Jade’s forearms, holding him in place. 

“Yes!” Jade usually struggles under Davey’s superior strength, but Davey’s weak with wanting and dulled faculties, so Jade overpowers him after a brief moment of squabbling. “Jesus, you smell like dirty hair. When was the last time you showered?” 

“Three days ago, I think,” Davey says breathlessly. 

“Ugh, that’s what we’re doing, then. You, my friend, need a shower. A cold shower. Then I’m throwing you in your bed and locking the door so you’ll sleep and let this whole thing go.” Jade wrestles Davey off of him, and eventually, off the couch, so they’re both standing facing the other, fingers interlocked. Davey’s heart is hysterical like that of a small mammal, and he gnashes his teeth with the surging neediness of wanting to touch Jade with more of his hands. He’s dizzy with the smell of him, the feel of his knuckles. 

Before Davey can do shit with his directionless desire, Jade dips down and grabs him around his ass, hauling him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. “Come on,” he mumbles, and they’re going to the bathroom. 

35 hours

There are a number of bathrooms in the frat, all of which would not pass any kind of cleanliness inspection. However, the first floor bathroom is easily the worst, seeing as it is the one that everyone uses when there’s a party. It’s the one that gets puked in most frequently, and cleaned least frequently. “Not the first floor bathroom!” Davey shrieks, kicking Jade or at least trying to. “You want me to _get clean_ , right?” 

Jade grunts in response. There’s a shower head in that bathroom, but it would be very generous to say that there is a shower. There’s a shower head in the corner, and a drain, but not a whole lot else. Jade deposits Davey onto the floor where he scrambles for a minute, dizzy and exhausted. He tilts his face up to Jade, smudges beneath his eyes the color of bruises, and watches Jade slam the water on with an elbow, eyes vulpine and triumphant. 

The water is fucking ice. Davey realizes very suddenly that he is wearing all of his clothes. 

Spray is clattering all around him and most likely, onto Jade, too, because there’s no shower curtain to protect or separate them. Davey is too shocked and dazed to do anything about it, though, so he just pinwheels around on the floor, bare feet sliding against filthy, grey tile as he tries to get enough of a grip to stand. His pants are getting weighed down, impossibly heavy. “I can’t believe you just did that to me.” 

He shakes his hair, looks though rivulets at Jade, who’s grinning in this broken way, leaning against the bathroom counter with wet spots on his shirt. 

“ _I_ can’t believe you haven’t turned the water off and slugged me. It’s like your subconscious knows this is the right thing to do.” 

Davey turns off the water and tries to slug Jade, because the option hadn’t even occurred to him before Jade suggested it. He is so tired that he can hardly see, and his wet fist flies through the air and connects halfheartedly with something that is not Jade’s gut, but rather, Jade’s open palm, held out to stop him. Almost falling over, Davey throws his sopping self into Jade’s arms, hangs off his neck. 

“What are you--ugh,” Jade says, hands letting go of Davey entirely to brace against the counter. Davey watches those fingers twitch, lets the warmth of Jade’s body cool on contact with his own wet skin. Jade tries to get away without touching Davey, but it doesn’t work, so he caves in and pries him off. 

Davey staggers backwards, nearly slipping in a puddle because the drain, most likely clogged with week old frat guy vomit, doesn’t work. “It’s okay, s’okay. I can wait,” he says, smiling. 

“Wait for what?” Jade says, though his eyes, turning black and widening, show that he knows what Davey’s talking about. 

“For you to stop _self-preserving._ ” 

Jade puts his face in his hands again, makes a frustrated noise. “Maybe it’s _mutual_ self preservation. Like, maybe I’m saving us _both_ from certain death.” 

“There’s no such thing as immortality, Jade!” Davey cries, equally frustrated. “I need a towel.” 

Looking weary, Jade rubs his temples a lot, stealing tiny, wondering glances in Davey’s direction. “I wish you’d give this thing up.” 

“If I did, it wouldn’t make it go away,” Davey says, and strips off his shirt. There he stands in the yellow light, chest marble white and dripping. Jade makes a strangled noise. 

“I don’t want it to _go away_ ,” Jade explains through a tight throat. He does not, however, explain what he actually wants, and even through Davey’s sleepless-haze, he knows this is because he’s not sure of what it is. Davey leaves, then, because he knows Jade will follow. 

It takes a while. He’s halfway up the stairs to the third floor when Jade finally catches up to him. “Where are you going?” 

“To get a _towel_ , because someone put me in the shower.” He stumbles into his room, out of his pants, which he leaves in a wet dark heap on the floor. He can feel Jade’s eyes all over him, across the muscles in his back, down his spine, along the curvature of his ass. If he felt capable, he would dry off slowly , but instead he just feels cold, so there’s nothing sexy about it. There’s a terrible ache in his chest, a nausea between his lungs, and his heart is hammering like a construction site. Davey suddenly feels so exhausted and shivery that he has to sit down, naked, on his floor. 

“Are you going to sleep?” Jade asks carefully. He leans against the doorframe, and Davey knows the image of him there, gawky and too long and too thin, will stay burnt into his mind if he tries to close his eyes. There will be that, and the empty taste of regret. 

“I don’t know,” Davey admits. “I don’t want to. I don’t even know if I can.” 

Jade hangs back, and Davey wants to cry. _This is the second crash,_ he thinks pointlessly. And then, _god, I’ve been awake for so long than I’m crashing a second time. That is so bad for me. For my heart._ This is a stupid thing to think, because Davey self-destructs in enough other ways that the strain of insomnia shouldn’t be any different. He’s not thinking clearly, though. “I’m going to try,” he says thickly, just in case Jade is waiting for an answer. 

“Okkkayyyy,” Jade says, making it very many syllables. It’s not a sarcastic lengthening. It’s like he wants to draw out how long he has to stand there. 

“I mean, if you’re not gonna...if you’re not willing to talk, then I might as well try to sleep.” 

Jade narrow his eyes, like he’s thinking about saying _you don’t want to talk_ , but he knows Davey well enough that he doesn’t say anything, just takes one clumsy step backwards. “You think you’ll be able to?” 

“I’m going to try.” 

“Fuck. Okay. I hope you don’t remember this in the morning.” 

Jade locks Davey in, accidentally, and Davey has to hammer on the door until Jade comes back apologetically and undoes the latch. 

36 hours

Davey finds Jade in his room, sitting upright on his bed staring at a composition notebook they’ve written songs in. He looks miserable. Davey feels more miserable, though, he’s certain of it. It’s the certainty and misery of a sleepless person, and nothing can be worse than that. “Hi,” Jade says, and slams the notebook closed. “I guess it didn’t work.” 

Depositing himself across the foot of Jade’s bed, Davey starts talking in a hysterical voice. “My chest hurts _so badly_. I just keep laying there, and trying so hard to fall asleep but I _cannot stop thinking_ ,” Davey wails, voice cracking. “I feel like _shit_.” 

Jade scoots forward, but not close enough to touch Davey. “What are you thinking about?” It might be a loaded question, but it also might not be. Davey has no ability to discern such things in his current state. He remembers that the reason he came in here was that he was mad at Jade. “I am totally fed up with you.” 

“What?! Me?” 

“Yes! You. You...you _pushed me_. And then, once I got there, you wouldn’t meet me halfway. You suck. I’m not eloquent anymore, so, _fuck you_.” Davey elaborates. There’s the other reason he came in here, which was the wanting to be in Jade’s company regardless of anything else reason. He doesn’t share that reason with Jade, however. Instead, he says, “I hate you.”

“I don’t know what to do with you, because nothing I say will make sense, because you’re completely out of your mind,” Jade offers. He must really pity Davey at his point, because he touches his arm. Davey’s skin jumps under his fingers, electrocuted.   
r32;“I know!” Davey shrieks, covering his face with his hand. “I know. I need to sleep, like, I admit that, but _fucking can’t_. I even took a tylenol PM, can you believe that?! I never take shit.” 

“I’m sorry, Dave,” Jade says, but it’s not an _I fucked up_ sorry, it’s a _this situation really sucks and I wish I could help_ sorry. 

“I want to die.” 

“No you don’t.” 

“What if I never sleep again?” 

“Then you’ll die. And you’ll get your wish.” 

Davey starts actually sobbing, so Jade stops, leans in close, opens his palm on Davey’s chest. “Whoa, hey, I was kidding. You’ll sleep again Dave, I promise.” 

Between sniffles, Davey mumbles something nonsensical about needing to get up and move out of Jade’s bed. He wants to get out of the room. He wants to leave, so Jade will follow. He can’t string enough words together to lie or make an excuse, though. 

“No you don’t,” Jade says firmly, and holds Davey in place. “Here, just lay down with me. I’ll rub your back or something.” 

Davey cries harder. 

Finally, Jade manages to usher Davey onto the roof, where there’s an inflatable mattress they shared during the summer when the air conditioning broke. It doesn’t have any sheets on it, so Jade dumps Davey in his mess of limbs and not onto the mattress then runs back to his room, grabs his comforter. While he’s gone, Davey lolls around on the damp, flocked rubber, wondering how on earth he’s going to survive when he’s pretty sure the only way to sleep is to make Jade quit self preserving. 

Once outside again, Jade wraps the comforter around both of them, and Davey is quiet, at least for a little while because he wasn’t expecting quite this much contact so soon. It’s a few hours past dawn, so birds are chirruping and trucks are rattling above them on Piedmont. Davey presses himself into Jade’s body, for warmth and because he wants to, and he’s beyond playing games and doing dances and holding himself back from anything he feels is his. 

“I don’t know what to do,” Davey says eventually, in a whisper because he’s abstractly worried about breaking something. 

“You’ll sleep eventually, it’s fine. We’ll just hang out until you get tired,” Jade sighs, hands skirting up Davey’s back and eyes drooping. Davey appreciates the effort, but doubts Jade will last very long. He rubs his face in Jade’s shirt, choking on the smell of him in it. 

“I don’t mean sleep. I just...I don’t know what to do, man,” Davey sniffs. 

“About us?” Jade asks, finally, _finally_ , says it. That word. 

Davey’s breath catches, making the impossible ache in his chest contract. “Yep.” 

The air is cold and damp with fog, and Davey puts his lips against Jade’s neck, just to keep them warm, he thinks, but when he feels the thrum of blood under nervous skin he knows there’s more than that. Jade tenses, then relaxes under him, shuddering. Davey reminds himself that Jade, too, is sleep deprived. Jade, too, is inarticulate. Jade, too, is tired of everything. 

“I fight it,” Jade says, swallowing. Davey feels the bobbing of his throat. 

“Why?” 

“I...I don’t know. Because in my head it’s perfect, and nothing real is ever perfect,” Jade says simply. “What would make you be the one, different thing?” 

Davey shakes his head, opens his mouth along the cords in Jade’s neck and smells salt in the air. “How do you know if you won’t even try?” He can feel Jade tensing and lurching under and around him, he can feel how much longer this is going to last. He knows that if he kisses Jade, right now, Jade will let him. Jade will give up his dream of perfection, and give in. 

His hands are shaking, so Davey braces them on Jade’s chest, feeling bones and muscles and the softness of pale skin over all of that. It feels terribly good, too good, too good to be true, maybe. But truth is relative, because it’s different than reality. Jade is real, he and Jade are _both_ real, and that seems like a logical enough reason to take the risk. “Why does it have to be perfect? Why can’t it just be real?” Davey asks, a naked, sleepy rawness to his voice. 

Jade pauses, and he an almost hear him blinking. The thudding of Jade’s heart, which Davey can feel beneath his palms, speeds up, and he knows that it is about to happen. r32;  
“Fuck you,” Jade hisses, his arms beginning to shake as he rolls Davey off of his chest and presses him hard, backwards into the air mattress. “Fuck you, for being irresistible and for making sense, even though you don’t make sense.” 

Davey waits, and he waits. He lies there on his back, held down by Jade and eyes glistening with an expectant sheen as he waits for something to break. 

And then it does, and Jade’s lips are on his with a wet, wanting ferocity. Davey almost feels his upper lip split against his teeth under the pressure that is all he ever wished and imagined it would be plus more, which isn’t perfection, merely reality, so he opens his mouth, and lets in the flood. 

 

37 hours

“I think I’m gonna go on a run,” Davey says, spread out and naked on the roof at eight in the morning, his skin feeling dewy and incandescent with sex. There are circles beneath Jade’s eyes, but they disappear with the expression he makes, because there’s no room for anything but pupil on his face. 

“You’re kidding.” 

“Duh,” Davey says, rolling over into Jade’s bony arms and kissing him. He’s surprised by how easy this is. His hands explore the ridges of his brows, his cheekbones, even though he’s done that already. He wants to do it again though, again and again until the shine of perfection tarnishes and there’s nothing but a human underneath. His chest feels like its splitting, but he doesn’t know if he’s beyond tired, or in love. It’s a similar sensation. 

“Are you sick of me yet?” 

“No,” Jade says very solemnly. “Are you sleepy yet?” 

Davey licks his lips, tries to feel it. The world seems strange in its newness, like he’s never touched the air at 8am. There’s a stretched-outness to it, like all the elasticity of time has drained out of the fibers. He’s tired, he knows that. He’s exhausted. He feels like shit. Sleep, however, is different from exhaustion. “I don’t know...” he says, voice reedy. He kisses Jade’s chin. “I kinda don’t want to sleep yet.” 

“There will be plenty of time in the morning,” Jade says with dark, hooded eyes, opening his hand on Davey’s side so his fingers fit slatted along his ribcage. 

“It is morning,” Davey mumbles, eyes closing, and waits for the sleep train to come.


End file.
